Jake Carpenter

I know how it looks. Ari Aster’s “Hereditary” is just becoming this year’s classy horror breakout hit, and here’s a lousy, straight-to-VOD knock-off with a conspicuously similar title, right? Well, there are no coincidences in marketing, but it turns out that Inheritance is actually a decent psychological thriller: Atmospheric, well-played and well-made, and dead serious….

The eponymous academy around which The Atticus Institute revolves, as we are told early on (via ominous letters on the screen, an info-dump technique frequently employed by mockumentary and found footage films), was founded by Dr. Henry West (William Mapother, “I Origins”) in order to study “psi-related phenomena,” such as clairvoyance and telekinesis, until it…